Who's Mining Your Internet Data the Best? Would you Believe PornHub?

What companies data-mine your Internet experience the best? Would you be surprised it isn't streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube?

No, it is the porn industry.

"While consuming porn is typically a private and personal affair, porn sites still track your every move: What content you choose, which moments you pause, which parts you repeat. By mining this data to a deeper degree than other streaming services, many porn sites are able to give internet users exactly what they want—and they want a lot of it," reads a report on the website Quartz.

The number of visits these sites get on a daily basis is astronomical: over 100 million on a daily basis on the most popular of porn sites, PornHub, the site's information page reveals.

"To put into perspective how much content that is: In 2017, Pornhub transmitted more than the entire contents of the New York Public Library's 50 million books combined," writes Quartz.

The biggest player in the porn world is MindGeek, a holding company that owns numerous adult sites and production companies, including PornHub. "Like other streaming giants, MindGeek's sites analyze user data, but the company has an edge when it comes to producing tailor-made content in-house. With at least 125 million daily visits, MindGeek has a massive range of users to draw data from and create content for," reports Quartz.

"Pornhub, in particular, operates one of the most sophisticated digital data analysis operations that caters primarily to users and not advertisers. Pornhub Insights provides transparency into its data collection—on the most intimate of subjects—by making research and analysis from billions of data points about viewership patterns, often tied to events from politics to pop culture, available to the public. It offers more than many other tech giants do."

Apple's iPhones and iPads have gotten free software updates, including battery improvements and a smarter virtual assistant. The new features and capabilities in the update, iOS 9, are primarily refinements rather than anything transformative.